Edson was one of the highly respected novelists from The United Kingdom. He was fond of writing his novels and short stories based on the escapism adventure, western, as well as the police procedural genres, writing around 137 novels in his career. Author Edson was born on February 17, 1928, as John Thomas Edson and died on July 17, 2014. From the year 1950 onwards, he used to reside near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire.
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All his life, author Edson was involved in writing books and novels, but gave it up completely in the year 2005 due to his ill health. He was born in a tiny mining village located near the border of the Derbyshire County, England, called Whitwell. Many of his ancestors used to work in the coal mines. The parents of author Edson got married in Whitwell, after which he was born as their first kid. When his father died in the year 1928, his mother was left alone as a 23 year old widow.
She went on to marry again when author Edson reached the age of 18. As a youngster, Edson used to visit the small cinemas in the towns of England very often and used to watch escapist adventure fares. All the time when his mother used to work, he used to be busy watching one or the other show. Eventually, he became very much obsessed with the Western and Escapist Adventure serials.
Later in his writing career, author Edson wrote in the appendices and foreword of many of his books how he rewrote the adventure serials and the cowboy movies that he watched in the cinema. In those types of movies and serials, author Edson was mainly intrigued by the mechanics behind card cheating, dressing and speaking style of the Westerners, the reason behind the gun jamming of the baddies. Initially, when he started writing, he was helped by one of his school teachers, who encouraged and assisted him to develop his writing skills. At the age of 18, author Edson went on to join the army. He served for a period of 12 years in the British Army, mainly as one of the Dog Trainers. During the time of his service, he used to get cooped up in the barracks for longer periods of time and used to utilize them for reading the books of the popular escapist writers like Nelson Nye, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Wallace, etc. Also, Edson used to get involved in watching films starring Errol Flynn, John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Audie Murphy, etc.